Nightmares

Sidetracked a little today--it would take too much energy to be derailed. After mentioning succubus last night and listening to Amy Lee and Seether, "Broken," now--i decided to see where term nightmare originated---i didn't think it had anything to do with mare, as in female horse--that seems to be a popular idea--as if riding a horse out of control, etc. in your dreams--i thought it might have something to do with mer, as in sea or ocean but looking it up on Wiki,

i found out that it comes from an Old English word, maere, which means goblin or incubus--who, of course, is the male equivalent of succubus---the original idea was that when you were asleep, such a spirit would try to suffocate you or suck the breath out of you--which explains why one of the posters advertising the old movie Gothic, about Mary Shelley and how she supposedly came up with the idea for Frankenstein, was a drug/alcohol induced nightmare--anyway the poster shows her in nightgown in bed with a goblin sitting on her chest like it was either drawing the life from her or at least tormenting her--interesting, succubus or incubus has come to mean more of a dream lover, yeah, perhaps with a sliding degree of evil involved--that is also how people in the middle ages to 19th centuries also saw vampire or vampyres--as drawing the lifeforce from folks --now i guess in the vampire "culture," such a being would be seen as a "psychic" vampire---that's why centuries ago, people that had consumption or tuberculosis were seen as the victims of such a vampire, that explained why for no apparent reason, they wasted away--it was also thought that they could turn into such a vampire themselves when they died, so they might be beheaded before they were buried--if problems continued, then later they might be exhumed and have their skeleton arranged in a "skull and crossbones" configuration-or if they were considered to appear not decomposed sufficiently, their corpse might be burned

years ago, i had a friend who was a Russian Orthodox priest(hope he still is, but our paths haven't crossed for years)--it was not long after a real exorcism had been done on a widow and her daughter who had been seen in our mental health clinic--but that is a story for another day---anyway, the priest always told me that it was dangerous to dwell on such things and how centuries ago, priests would go into the desert to meditate and they were invariably tempted by succubi and how it took a righteous man to resist them

And then, at least in the Old South, it was considered dangerous to have a cat alone in the room with a baby, especially a sleeping one, because of the belief that it could suck the life out of the baby. The idea being that cats were creatures of "both worlds" that could at will move back and forth between them.

So, nightmares and vampires, a few cats thrown in--- more info than most people would want to know-not as interesting as succubus or succubi, i suppose

peace

-will-